This is an article about Kimberton Waldorf School’s bird sanctuary published in Audubon Pennsylvania’s Bird Town Flyer:
By Tim Walsh and Celia Martin
Kimberton Waldorf School consists of a breathtaking 430-acre campus with rolling hills, farm, bubbling creek, and forest. We also have the magical French Creek Conservation Trail on campus, which is used daily by the students for both educational and recreational purposes.
The garden actively maintains about twenty bluebird houses in which Eastern bluebirds, tree swallows, wrens, and an occasional chickadee nest. We encourage these birds in the garden because they eat bugs so they are a natural insect control since we garden organically. We also have gourd houses for purple martins and a feeder for the hummingbirds that visit in the summer. On our campus, the birds enjoy the fruits of serviceberry, dogwood, mulberry, wild cherry, crab apple, and yes, poison ivy! Birds have also been known to take bites out of our apples and tomatoes and they usually eat all of the blueberries before we can get to them but we are willing to share. There are many birds that nest on our school campus and in the surrounding property in the woods. These include those already mentioned plus woodpeckers (including the magnificent pileated woodpecker), titmice, robins, mockingbirds, killdeer, mourning doves, cardinals, blue jays, many kinds of sparrows, and much more. Our fields are an active hunting ground for great blue herons, red-tailed hawks, kestrels, turkey, black vultures, and other birds of prey including an occasional bald eagle. We once had a sandhill crane walking through the fields which I think became lost during its migration. The
French Creek, which borders our property, is home to many geese and ducks including mergansers and wood ducks, and the rattling call of kingfishers can be heard frequently. At night we have heard the calls of both screech owls in the summer and great horned owls in the winter. We definitely have many kinds of birds living here, feeding here, and nesting here. Tours available!
